^{20 Ref} You are my fighting axe and my instrument of war: with you the nations will be broken; with you kingdoms will be broken;

^{21 Ref} With you the horse and the horseman will be broken; with you the war-carriage and he who goes in it will be broken;

^{22 Ref} With you man and woman will be broken; with you the old man and the boy will be broken; with you the young man and the virgin will be broken;

^{23 Ref} With you the keeper of sheep with his flock will be broken, and with you the farmer and his oxen will be broken, and with you captains and rulers will be broken.

^{24 Ref} And I will give to Babylon, and to all the people of Chaldaea, their reward for all the evil they have done in Zion before your eyes, says the Lord.

^{25 Ref} See, I am against you, says the Lord, O mountain of destruction, causing the destruction of all the earth: and my hand will be stretched out on you, rolling you down from the rocks, and making you a burned mountain.

^{26 Ref} And they will not take from you a stone for the angle of a wall or the base of a building; but you will be a waste place for ever, says the Lord.

^{27 Ref} Let a flag be lifted up in the land, let the horn be sounded among the nations, make the nations ready against her; get the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz together against her, make ready a scribe against her; let the horses come up against her like massed locusts.

^{28 Ref} Make the nations ready for war against her, the king of the Medes and his rulers and all his captains, and all the land under his rule.

^{29 Ref} And the land is shaking and in pain: for the purposes of the Lord are fixed, to make the land of Babylon an unpeopled waste.